This micro fiction story comes from a writing prompt with three simple words:
- Once
- Ashen
- Backlit
But with one very specific rule: I couldn’t use any of those words in the final piece.
And that’s the kind of constraint I love. It forces you to explore tone and imagery in a sideways, slanted way.
It becomes a creative puzzle—one where every solution adds more texture.
I hope you enjoy…
The facility was named Fjordhaven, but nothing had seen a fjord in decades. It smelled like lilacs and antiseptic. The furniture was blonde wood, the silence a shade of soft grey.
Room 42B had a resident who wasn’t on any of the charts. He’d arrived in the middle of a Wednesday, wheeled in by a nurse no one remembered hiring.
He wore a robe embroidered with runes and juice stains. Eyes like northern lights. Hair like a broom on strike.
“He keeps asking for the ancient spoons,” muttered the head nurse. “And he speaks in—what is it?—Danish iambic gibberish?”
“He bit me,” added Janne from physio. “Gently, but with purpose.”
The man had renamed himself Elder Waffles. Said the name came to him in a dream involving Björk and a washing machine. He claimed to remember before. Before time, before soup, before the Great Folding of Socks.
In the dining hall, he delivered sermons with his pudding. Drew circles, spirals, an eye that blinked when you didn’t look straight at it. The other residents began following him. They pushed aside their knitting circles and started building monuments from prunes.
“We are the crumbling ones,” he whispered. “The forgotten engines. But dessert is the key. Eat what is sweet and you’ll taste the truth.”
Then came the thunderstorm. And the bingo cards that spelled out a prophecy. And the discovery of an elevator that went nowhere… except, sometimes, elsewhere.
By Friday, the entire west wing had vanished. In its place: a garden of laughing tulips, and a blue creature rolling in crumbs, muttering, “More… More…”
© 2025 Eric MontgomeryEnjoy the story?
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